The Questions That Clients Most Often Hire Me to Explore

People regularly ask me what I “do” as a design researcher so I decided to write about it.

For the next ten weeks, my posts will be under “The Questions That Clients Most Often Hire Me to Explore ” theme. (Yea, I need a catchier name.)

I plan to craft one post on how we gather input around each of these eight questions:

• What should we build?

• Are we building the right thing?

• Are we building the thing right?

• Who are our customers?

• What are our customers’ needs and motivations?

• How can we improve this?

• Do they understand this?

• Why did this metric go up or down?

Then I’ll write about my responses to two common client questions:

• Can you teach my team to do what you do?

• Can you teach me to do what you do?

Ten questions answered in ten weeks!

No, that’s not exactly right. I cannot give you all the answers, but I can help you to understand how we discover immensely valuable data to inform “the answers.” I’ll explain…

Where do we start? What are we looking for? How do we make sure our learnings are trustworthy? How do we translate research questions into participant questions? How do we make sense of what we gather? How do we ensure findings are acted upon?

Stay tuned. This will be fun and worthwhile.